Can NCAA's new tournament metric make March less maddening?

The NCAA has devised a new metric to evaluate, select and seed the entrants in its March Madness championship each year. We all will get the opportunity to see how it functions in a few months, after enough games of the 2018-19 season have been played to compile a reasonable amount of data.

What we won't get to see is how this new formula, tabbed the NCAA Evaluation Tool, would have measured teams in the past — a shrewd move by the NCAA. Because even though it might give us a better feel for how NET works, it also would lead more people to react to past rankings than the news of this impactful change.

The NCAA would rather we all focus on the fact the NET factors in game results, strength of schedule, location of games, scoring margin, offensive and defensive efficiency and the quality of wins and losses, rather than whether 28-5 Saint Mary’s might have been snubbed if this system had been in place for the 2017-18 season.

“Not much would come from analyzing what happened in the past,” Dan Gavitt, NCAA senior vice president of basketball, told Sporting News. "We're looking forward and not backward.”

Gavitt said he's "excited” the introduction of the new metric “does sort of modernize something that had been outdated for a while.”

The NCAA had used the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) for 37 years as a mechanism to sort teams in the process of evaluating tournament candidates. A win over an RPI top 50 team was seen as more valuable than a team ranked 100th, and so on. The RPI formula comprised a team’s own winning percentage, the winning percentage of its opponents and the winning percentage of its opponents’ opponents.

The weighting of those numbers led critics to complain that it was little more than a strength-of-schedule measure. Actually, that was one of the nicer things said about it.

The National Association of Basketball Coaches requested in 2016 the NCAA consider changing to a metric that would be a composite of various competing measures that had developed for the evaluation of teams, from Ken Pomeroy’s “KenPom” rankings to ESPN’s BPI to the KPI developed by Kevin Pauga of the Michigan State athletic department.

The NCAA convened a meeting of those analysts in January 2017, during which time the various mathematicians explained that averaging those numbers together would be statistically unsound. That set the NCAA in the direction of configuring its own number; 19 months later, the NET was ready to unveil.

— For those who wanted a “smarter” metric: “This is a very forward-thinking, sophisticated metric,” Gavitt told SN. “It still is results-oriented, but brings in some predictiveness the RPI never had.”

To arrive at the proper formula, the NCAA worked with Google Cloud professional services and ran data for Division I seasons dating back to 2003 through a machine learning algorithm. The NCAA wanted its own metric so it wouldn't have to rely on an outside source that might, for instance, choose to exit the business.

— For those opposed to inclusion of margin of victory: “One of the things we learned over the course of a couple years, without considering some level of scoring margin, it’s hard if not impossible to bring some level of predictiveness into the metric,” Gavitt said.

Margin of victory is essential to those handicapping games, but in league standings a one-point victory looks the same as a 30-point blowout. There also are concerns that giving teams incentive to win by a lot of points will lead to what many view as dubious sportsmanship, such as leaving regulars in the game longer to run up the score.

This formula caps the margin of victory differential at 10 points. A 25-point win will have the same impact in the calculations as one decided by 10 points. Upon determining they needed victory margin to make the formula as effective as possible, Gavitt said, data tests were run using the full margin, then caps at 25, 20, 15 and 10 points.

“The results were made more accurate, without a doubt, by having scoring margin in it,” he said. “But the difference for an uncapped margin as opposed to 10 was very minimal. Capping it at 10 gave us a level of confidence the rankings would be effective without changing habits, getting into sportsmanship issues.”

The committee also decided that all overtime games will be considered, for margin purposes, as a 1-point win for the victor and a 1-point loss for the team defeated. Logically, Gavitt said, an overtime game is a tie, even though circumstances can lead to a more lopsided final, such as Arizona’s 78-67 overtime win over UCLA in the 2018 Pac-12 Tournament.

— For those worried about "outliers” in various metrics: The NABC expressed concern to the NCAA about how various metrics viewed some teams much differently.

Villanova was No. 1 in the 2016-17 RPI, and No. 2 in the KenPom rankings. But Wichita State that year entered the NCAA Tournament ranked No. 5 in KenPom and 32nd in the RPI. Wisconsin’s style of play under Bo Ryan always seemed to produce flattering KenPom rankings. From 2009-15, the Badgers finished in the KenPom top 10 five times — and landed at No. 12 in 2012-13 with a 23-12 team.

Gavitt expressed confidence, based on the trials, “This new metric helps bring those outliers closer to the mean.”

One area in which the NCAA is likely to continue battling public perception is that the metric — whichever metric it uses — is widely believed to be the arbiter of which teams are chosen for the tournament and which get comfortable seeds.

As with the RPI, the NET will be a sorting tool. Beating teams ranking high in the NET will be valued more than beating teams ranked lower.

It’s really that simple, but the formula — and the process of concocting it — is a lot more complicated.